Saturday, April 27, 2013

Craig Vernall (Baptist national leader) is a bit grumpy at being called homophobic, when he's just been innocently doing his bit to prevent gay people having equal rights: "It seems if you’re opposed to gay marriage, you’re just branded and labelled homophobic."

Oh, diddums. Did someone use a word with negative connotations to describe your refusal to embrace equality? Poor ickle Craig.

I'll make you a deal, mmkay? You stop campaigning for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and I'll stop calling you a homophobe.

And here we have a truly epic government-funded PSA from Singapore, targeting the YOLO generation, because we apparently aren't concerned enough about our future fertility.

One of the ads features Alice, a 'wild and reckless' girl in a YOLO crop top inexplicably steering a convertible from the passenger's seat while holding balloons, with a pop-up warning that 'extended adolescence for twenty-somethings today has a biological cost for women.'

Quick, y'all, get breeding! Else our extended adolescence will have a biological cost!

Their use of metaphor is liberal, with eggs/fertility depicted as balloons, golden goose eggs, etc. I do worry that this campaign is not sufficiently patronising for its target audience, despite the heavy use of cartoon imagery, bright colours, and nursery rhyme references. Perhaps they could dumb it down a little more, for those of us that didn't quite grasp it?

Just to be clear, one's fairytale ending must involve breeding, else you simply don't qualify for Happy Ever After. The Snow White ad features the downright disturbing text, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall / Who in this land is the richest of all? / Snow White, beyond the mountains, with her seven children / Who learn, play, and give her kisses every day / Snow White is the richest of all."

The Herald has the story of a female technology developer who was fired after tweeting about a group of men she claimed were making sexual comments at a Silicon Valley technology conference.

There is nothing sexist about a man making a penis joke to another man. "Dongle" is a hilarious word, and just because Adria Richards doesn't agree, doesn't mean she has the right to play the sexism card. If her sense of humour differs from that of her fellow PyCon attendees, she could fix that problem by, I dunno, not eavesdropping on their conversations?

Richards is doing everyone a disservice with this sort of carryon. There's enough legitimate battles she could be fighting as a woman in tech - she should naff off and devote her energies to one of them.